Look who has weaseled his way onto the New York's Post's famous gossip column Page 6 today (hmm...gossip-time... he and RM dont get along, huh!) .... - via

Unbelievable... A Belgian embassy official in Delhi allegedly got involved in an affair with her driver - who later killed her!! Even a Bollywood movie director couldn’t have thought of this... Life is stranger than art!

A Belgian embassy official was brutally murdered on Saturday night at Vasant Vihar, part of Delhi's posh diplomatic enclave. The police have now arrested the suspect, the murdered woman's driver – and are hinting that it was a crime of passion. The Belgian embassy already seems to be distancing itself from the incident. Belgian Embassy Spokesperson Jean Lee Villet says, “She had nothing to do with the embassy. She came here on an official passport and not on a diplomatic one."


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And an old fashioned sex scandal from the UK :)

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Today, I heard a song called Amy (hear a 1 minute excerpt here from a previous release) by Kante Manfila, a Guinean born guitarist from Mali, on Andy Kershaw's program on BBC Radio (song was on the Sep 10th playlist.. the link is updated every week and so after next week, you will not see the list I heard today.)

The reason to highlight the song is not because I love music from Africa (read my post about Farka Toure's guitar playing) but because the song is part of a new release, 'Various: West Africa Unwired', which is part of the Think Global label from the World Music Network ..

..that combines the ideals of reducing poverty, defending human rights and protecting the environment with superb collections of cutting edge music from around the world. In partnership with Amnesty International and Oxfam, all Think Global releases will use a novel type of packaging – using only 100% recycled card with no plastic tray or plastic jewel case.

For information on music from West Africa, see the following wikipedia links for music from Benin - Burkina Faso - Chad - Côte d'Ivoire - Gambia - Ghana - Guinea - Guinea-BissauLiberia - Mali - Mauritania - Niger - Nigeria - Senegal - Sierra Leone - Togo and Western Sahara.

You can also read, "West Africa's Musical Powerhouse" by Lucy Duran, in Rough Guide to World Music Volume One (Simon Broughton, Mark Ellingham, James McConnachie, James and Orla Duane (Ed.), pp 539-562, 2000.)

Also see this great video - Gobissa and Child, See the Rider by Markus James.

Enlisting the brilliant support of Hassi Sare (njarka violin, vocals), Solo Sidibe (kamele n'goni, vocals), and Hamma Sankare (calabash, vocals), James creates a beautiful music video about the contrast of life in the dessert and life speeding up in the modern world and how life could be over at anytime. The music video was filmed in the sand dunes and villages in and around Timbuktu, Mali.

Celebrating R. K. Narayan, on the occasion of his 100th anniversary is Jhumpa Lahiri* through this article, Narayan Days.


* Read this Jhumpa Lahiri short story in New Yorker magazine from May 2006. An overview of her literature is here. I have enjoyed Lahiri's short stories far more than anything I have read from other Indian-origin authors who reside in the US...only because she did not make a big deal of mixed culturual identities (she writes equally well about both Indian and American personas and a good short story is exactly that - a good story about people!)...or so I thought until I just researched (or to use the right verb, googled) and found articles in the WSJ and Newsweek where Lahiri talks about her hyphenated existence and about the "intense pressure to be at once 'loyal to the old world and fluent in the new.'" Blaah...wonder if the media makes a big deal out of the author's mixed identities across two nations, two cultures, and worst still...the immigrant experience, every time they encounter an author of Indian origin or whether they do so only because Indian authors (Many thanks, Bharati Mukherjee & Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni!!) have made multi-culturism and the immigrant experience their only selling point over the years. Its probably a little of both - a chicken and egg problem of sorts ...


Anyways, back to RK or Rasipuram Krishnaswami Ayyar Narayanaswami... who was essentially the first Indian writer in English to become famous outside of India* too. Tagore precedes him but I consider him more a poet than a writer and more of his work was in Bengali than in English. Appropriately, RK Narayan is one of the early chapters in a recent book I read (read only about 60% of it) - Modern South Asian Literature in English by Paul Brians, part of the Series Literature as Windows to World Cultures. (Brians is a Professor of English at Washington State University, Pullman. He also maintains a webpage on Common English errors, has a page on Resources for study of World Civilizations, and The Chernobyl Poems of Lyubov Sirota)

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* For example, see:
- Tribute from VS Naipual in Time magazine. (wow..he has a good word to say about someone!!)
- Pankaj Mishra discusses his work in the New York Review of Books.
- The life of RK Narayan in California Literary Review
- Obituary in New York Times
- Paul Brian's World Literature in English list has a study guide to RK's The Guide

but here is someone (Shashi Tharoor) who is not a fan!

Other Links:
- Vendor of treats - a tribute to RK Narayan
- A friend remembers RK.
- Another friend reminisces

My Sister, Guard Your Veil; My Brother, Guard Your Eyes by Lila Azam Zanganeh

http://www.thenation.com/directory/bios/lila_azam_zanganeh

http://www.complete-review.com/reviews/iran/zanganla.htm

http://www.pbs.org/kcet/tavissmiley/archive/200604/20060414.html

Lila Azam Zanganeh discusses Giorgio Fabre's new book about the relations between Hitler and Mussolini

Lila Azam Zanganeh, in the NYT (Nov. 7, 2004)

- 7 / 22 / 06

10 years ago, I would be listening to classical music all the time. These days it is jazz (and occasionally blues) .. listening to it incessantly on the internet for the most part - my favorite shows being Jazz with Mell Hill on BBC Radio and WWOZ.org straight from New Orleans.

But driving back from running some errands today, I was taken back to those times remembering a past joy.. (for listening to classical music has now become a past fad, the possesion of 100+ CDs from those days notwithstanding!) ... when I heard two great performances today on WGBH.org public radio

1) Ravel: Tzigane played by Dmitri Torchinsky on violin and Daniel del Pino on piano.

2) Paganini's 'Introduction, theme & variations on Paisiello's "Nel cor più"' played by Romanian violinist Eugen at the Newport Music Festival, which took place this year from July 7–23.